ABSTRACT
The slogan "II faut etre de son temps" has often been cited as central to the conception of nineteenth-century Realism. "One must be of one's times" was the battle cry of Gustave Courbet and his followers: the admonition to reject the atemporal generalization of classical art or the anachronistic historicism of the Romantics and turn instead to the contemporary world in all its detailed concreteness for inspiration. For nineteenth-century artists like Courbet and Francisco Oiler, who were painting during what might be called, to borrow a phrase from John Berger, "the moment of landscape," this genre was most important of all in establishing a sense of place. "Place" of course, referred in the nineteenth century, to what was by definition the regional, the marginal, the peripheral. Provincial life might be presented in a suitably sweetened, idealized form as the "picturesque".
